Aptara and Scott Abel (Content Wrangler) have created this interesting infographic on the state of the eBook publishing space.  As more and more content goes digital, it will be crucial to understand how to leverage eBooks and similar forms of digital information. 

Below is a good guide to consider if you’re thinking about creating an eBook. 

The navigation system on her phone has turned her life around.  Judy, a 50 year old woman feels like a new person. She can now go where ever she wants because the navigation software on her phone is intelligent enough to recognize where she is and where she wants to go.  But for her it’s more than that.   

The augmented reality overlays from Route 66 allowed her to follow a virtual car on her mobile to her destination.  As you may have guessed, Judy has a phobia of getting lost.  But these new intelligent mobile solutions are opening up a world that has been lost to her for 34 years.  Until now. 

The following presentation was delivered as a Keynote at the Intelligent Content Conference in Palm Springs last week.  I focused on three use cases (SCVNGR, Mobile Dating, and Shazam) that are creating intelligent solutions on mobile devices. 

After giving the presentation, I was surprised by the 25 minute Q&A session primarily focused on the privacy issues the audience saw as troubling.     

While Oprah took a stab at the privacy issues, I want to briefly address them here.  To me, empowering users to control where, who and how they share information is critical.  Moreover, I believe people should be fairly compensated for giving up their data. 

Yet when you look at information privacy on a global level, there isn’t a world governing body that can dictate how your information is used in each country.  That means China is playing by a different set of rules than Germany or Canada.  That means while you may know your rights in your home country, it doesn’t mean that other countries are observing them. 

Lastly, I want to thank Scott Abel for brainstorming with me to come up with the idea for this presentation.  Both he and I like to make seemingly boring subject matters more interesting.  I believe this presentation accomplished that. 

Please let me know in the comments…

A guide for Entrepreneurs

There is a lot of content created by the Venture Capital community that has helped countless entrepreneurs.  In fact, one of my favorites is How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs.

I recently stumbled upon the article again and it reminded me of an article I’ve been meaning to write for my entrepreneurial friends.   We’ve all heard the horror stories (fairly or unfairly) of how Venture Capitalists have screwed over the founders of companies.

What we rarely hear about is the enormous value that some in the Venture Capital community create when investing in a startup.  Whether it’s strategic help, introductions to customers, joint ventures with other portfolio companies, and just plain fair dealings.  I want to help narrow your choices by providing a starting point.

How was the list determined?

I created the VC guide using state of the art sentiment analysis technology from Lithium (formerly Scout labs), confidential reviews from entrepreneurs on TheFunded.com, and four surveys that I issued across four different social platforms.  I also looked for mentions of individual VC’s on Quora to gain additional insight.

The result is the top 30.  If your company is fortunate enough to be working with any of these people then you’re working with a fair and devoted individual.   Using Lithium’s sentiment analysis tools, attributes like helpful, fair, brilliant, profitable, amazing, and knowledgeable are consistent attributes for this group.

It’s important to note that this is not an influence or popularity list.  The list was created to identify the people in the Venture Capital community that people respect most.   Of course this is not the definitive list but in my research this group came out on top.

Ranked #1, Brad Feld had this to say on earning the respect of Entrepreneurs in the Venture Capital industry: “I try hard to be straightforward and transparent. I do what I say I’m going to do and I’m very open about my thinking (see www.feld.com).”

What is Socialytics?

Socialytics or social analytics is the emerging practice of analyzing social media data in order to help with a strategic goal.  If you don’t like the term, please don’t take it out on me.

I used a weighted average ranking system to determine the list.  So even though Dave McClure and Marc Andreessen were not rated on The Funded, they ranked  high enough in the other categories to make the list.  Based on what I uncovered in my research, they deserve their spots.

Final Thoughts…

It’s interesting to note how many early stage investors made the list.  Are they generally more helpful?  Do they need to be in order to get their newly funded businesses off the ground? What is First Round Capital doing differently to have such a large share of the top 48 (see below)?

So what do you think?  Did I miss anyone?

The Top 30 with links to their Twitter Accounts

The Narrowly Missed List – High Reputations / (not in order)

Can a company based out of Bozeman, Montana be plugged into the customer support needs of major corporations worldwide?  On the surface, the answer is a resounding YES.  But let’s look behind the help desk and take a closer look.

RightNow Background

RightNow (NASDAQ:RNOW)  is a cloud based Web Customer Service (WCS) platform that has been named by Gartner as a leader in their WCS magic quadrant.   Their mantra is to rid the world of bad customer experiences.  Founded in September 1997, the company has built an impressive suite of WCS solutions that has helped propel their stock by an impressive 64% over the last 12 months.

RightNow reported $152 million in revenue for CY 2009 with a net income of $5.87 million. This was their first year of profitability since 2005. Their revenue breaks down to 69% US, 19% EMEA, and 12% APAC. Most of their international channel is handled with partners, while their US is supported by direct sales.

RightNow Product Line

The RightNow Approach to the Market

Given the wide range of products they support and the new markets they are driving into, it’s no surprise they have acquired or built solutions to fit market needs. Their last big acquisition in 2009 was HiveLive, a wikis/blogs/forums solution that appears to be the foundation for their social support community solution.

RightNow’s product mix and positioning can be confusing. Their overarching product is called “RightNow CX” and can be any combination of their products or features. Their pricing is done by suites, which can be a combination of products and suites. RightNow seems to make a distinction between product groupings and pricing.

The RightNow Pricing Guide (unverified)

According to our research the pricing breaks down as follows:

• Core Solution
• Standard Suite ($110 seat/month)
• Enterprise Suite ($140 seat/month) (includes Standard)
• Contact Center Suite ($250 seat/month) (Includes Enterprise)
• Chat Suite ($90 seat/month) (additional and separate offering)

What are RightNow’s Strengths?

• Large, established name with huge customer list and a wide product range that fills many needs.
• Incredibly broad set of products that do everything customer-driven: CRM, lead generation, email. management, chat, forums, wikis, blogs, ticketing, KB, etc.. essentially a “one-stop” shop for everything customer experience-related.
• All of their products are integrated for Support reps, providing a “knowledge foundation” that allows for data to published into all of their different products.
• Breadth of product line offers a one-stop-shop.  They have very good coverage across the needs of WCS.
• Most products are Support Rep oriented (product development focus is on helping their job).
• Base products come with “design” work (services attached) to help customize and brand to client’s needs.
• Strong executive team with a good track record of achievement.
• Financially secure organization.  They’re going to be around for awhile.

What are RightNow’s Weaknesses?

• Self-service Knowledge Base through the web is the most significant source of increasing the efficiencies of Support reps, but the RightNow product from the end-user’s experience can be confusing.
• The CX product set creates information overload for agents – product very unclear on how it makes the life of the CSR reps easier, especially if more content is created when you deploy Social.
• Still driven strongly by desktop software (Dynamic Agent Desktop is the core piece that connects everything).
• Web-based products go wide instead of deep. Their focus is integrating horizontally rather than going deep into specific products.
• Doesn’t solve the documentation problem.  Meaning, where do your customers go to learn about your entire solution in one place.  For example: The book versus magazine article approach to learning.
• Single Sourcing of content.  When information changes in one article, that change isn’t reflected in other articles.  Meaning, if I need to update a paragraph of information about a product, someone will need to search and replace every instance of that information everywhere else.
• Lack of integration to WCS point solution providers (ZenDesk, Adobe, MindTouch, GetSatisfaction, Assistly, ScreenSteps, etc.). If I have these solutions already, why would I switch to RightNow?

Where are RightNow’s Community Sites?

• Pharos Systems
• BlackBoard Support community

P.S. Thank you Roy Kim for researching the information for this article.

Last week Scott Abel and I held a live webinar for content strategists.  Due to popular request, I am posting the presentation here:

Guest Post by Anne Gentle

Meeting business goals with emergent social software, this is Enterprise 2.0. As a technical writer, do you doubt that Enterprise 2.0 can happen where you work? Consider this. Even the most influential and gate-keeping newspapers now allow comments alongside their strictly styled, investigated, and copy-edited content. A browser sidebar from Google called Sidewiki enables annotation on any page on the entire web. Traditional technical communication may not have enabled readers to talk about the content or talk to each other alongside the content, but the times (and The Times) are changing.

You Are Here

Across the software industry today, writers are proving their worth by aligning with business values such as education, training, customer support, presales, marketing, or development. We seek our fit into the overall content strategy in any organization. Some of us are the content strategy advocates in our organization. But social media is sometimes a public relations role, or a marketing role, even though our content has a place on the external website and could be strategically integrated into the overall website. Social software can be overwhelming and a time sink without knowing how to narrow down the choices. Without a strategy, it seems like a hit or miss proposition. Make a map from business goals to social software to get there.

Where is There?

Enabling content creation or content curation through social software is no simple undertaking, nor is it the right fit for every organization. Depending on the business goals and key performance indicators for your success, you can discover where “there” is. For customer support content, responsiveness is important as well as customer satisfaction. For education and training, the amount of time a user spends with a learning product, or how often they share it with others can indicate success. Only you know where “there” is for your success factors. Certain qualities for your content will help you achieve nearly any business goal, such as those in the following list.

Searchable

Searchable content can be listed when searching with major search engines and is available on the Internet. Google’s home page is the first page users go to prior to finding the answer to their question from your content. Also, once a user is in your content collection, search within a smaller set of content may be critical to their success. Searching is easy, finding is hard. Make finding as easy as possible.

Shareable

Due to the economy on the social web where reciprocity and reputation are highly valued, and the currency is attention paid in links and time spent on a site, shareable content means that users can participate in the exchange of links for motivation or payment.

Sociable

Sociable content is interactive, conversational, engaging, and increases a sense of community or belonging when participating on a site. Sociable content works well when customer loyalty or lead generation is important.

Syndicated

Syndication means that a user can subscribe to content updates that are important to him or her. Syndicated content puts the user in control of how much information they receive and how they use it, whether it’s on a mobile device such as a smart phone or in their email inbox. Syndication can work well in a development or support environment when notification about the latest updates is crucial to the business.

Getting There

To find our place in Enterprise 2.0, technical communicators should understand that social media and collaboration is a part of our job to provide a content offering from their company. By approaching the enormous potential of the social web with Enterprise 2.0 in mind, we can make it manageable and avoid time sinks. Getting to know customers through the social web is a good first step. We can also participate with customers on the social web as appropriate. Finally, building a community or platform that enables content sharing and collaboration is the ultimate reach and influence builder for your content. Content that is shareable, sociable, searchable, and syndicated can go far and wide on the social web, helping customers meet their goals, and companies reach theirs.

About the Author: Anne Gentle is the author of the book Conversation and Community, The Social Web for Documentation. She also writes a blog JustWriteClick about Technical Communicators.